The covenant - James A. Michener [506]
He spent two weeks trying to invent some excuse for returning to Trianon, and then one night the driver was there again with a note: 'Dr. Pretorius of Paarl is coming to dinner and would like to meet you. Clara.' It was the beginning of a thrilling experience, for Pretorius was active on a committee agitating to have Afrikaans accepted as the legal equivalent of Dutch and he was excitable about the matter: 'Acts of Parliament must be printed in Afrikaans. Our major newspapers should convert to it immediately. I've been speaking with our leading clergymen. I want our Bible to be in our language.'
'Are they ready for that?'
'No. In that quarter I receive much opposition. But consider. For three centuries in the late Middle Ages people spoke one language and read their Bible in Latin. That had to change.'
'The Catholic church still conducts its Masses in Latin.'
'That will change, too. The day will come when your daughter here is married by a predikant reading the service from an Afrikaans Bible.'
'You think so soon?' Mrs. van Doorn asked. 'I'm afraid you'll be an old maid, Clara, if you wait for that.' Clara did not blush, but Detleef did.
After one agitated flight of speech, Dr. Pretorius looked about the room as though to command close attention, then said in a softer voice, 'I want to speed the acceptance of our true language because it can become the chief agency in uniting the Afrikaners of this land and inspiring them to wrest the government from the English.'
'We have the numbers already,' Coenraad pointed out.
'But without a central soul, numbers are nothing. And what is the soul of a people? Its language. With Afrikaans we can capture this nation.'
At a subsequent meeting, at which he especially wanted Detleef to be present, Pretorius faced up to the accusation, launched by Coenraad, that Afrikaans was a second-class peasant language: 'Exactly, and that's why its vitality is assured. It will be precisely like English. And why is that language so effective?'
Each listener offered some reason: 'No declension of nouns.' 'Few subjunctive verbs.' 'Strict word order, which assures meaning.' 'A lot of quick short words to indicate case.' 'A simplified spelling.'
Clara said, 'And if English spots a good word in another language, it takes it . . . with no apologies.'
At each idea, Dr. Pretorius nodded approvingly, then asked permission to read from the work of a distinguished Danish scholar who was exploring this subject: 'He is Dr. Otto Jespersen, world-famous authority, and he says, "The English language is signalized by order and consistency... Simplification is the rule." And here he makes a point which relates specifically to our new Afrikaans: "Whenever I think of English and compare it with other languages, it seems to me positively and expressly masculine. It is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it."'
He asked Clara to pass out slips of paper, and when they all had pencils he directed them to write this sentence in English: We ourselves often took our dogs with us. 'Four pronouns to express the first person plural. Now see what happens when we write the same sentence in Afrikaans: Ons onsself het dikwelf ons honde saam met ons geneem. One wordonsto convey all those meanings.'
'But isn't the English more precise?'
'It is indeed. Just as the Latin forms agricola, by the farmer, agricolae, to the farmer, are more precise than the farmer. But we refuse to bother with such niceties. Prepositions are so much simpler. One word for farmer. Sixty prepositions to define relationships.'
From another pocket he produced a handful of sheets on which verses from Matthew, Chapter 6, had been printed in English:
9. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
10. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in